ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we will consider two Bayes procedures, one from stoke neurology, and the second from the epidemiology of viral disease. Each case will begin with a discussion of background material to build up some intuition concerning the medical issue at hand. This will be followed by development of the prior distribution, the conditional distribution, and the loss function. From this step we will construct the Bayes procedure, examine some of its properties, and see how it changes based on small alterations in the prior distribution. 8.2 Illustration 1: Stroke Treatment This example illustrates the construction of a Bayes estimate for the treatment of acute stroke with tissue-plasminogen activator (tPA). 8.2.1 Background Cerebrovascular accidents (CVAs or strokes) are abrupt interruptions of blood flow to the brain. These interruptions lead to massive brain cell death, producing paralysis, loss of cognitive function, and, in extreme cases, coma and death.
